Awards
2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist
Synopses & Reviews
Jhumpa Lahiri's debut story collection,
Interpreter of Maladies, took the literary world by storm when it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. Fans who flocked to her stories will be captivated by her best-selling first novel, now in paperback for the first time.
The Namesake is a finely wrought, deeply moving family drama that illuminates this acclaimed author's signature themes: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the tangled ties between generations.
The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of an arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Ashoke does his best to adapt while his wife pines for home. When their son, Gogol, is born, the task of naming him betrays their hope of respecting old ways in a new world. And we watch as Gogol stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With empathy and penetrating insight, Lahiri explores the expectations bestowed on us by our parents and the means by which we come to define who we are.
Review
"[Q]uietly dazzling....[A] wonderfully intimate and knowing family portrait...a debut novel that is as assured and eloquent as the work of a longtime master of the craft." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Review
"Lahiri's short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, and her deeply knowing, avidly descriptive, and luxuriously paced first novel is equally triumphant." Donna Seaman, Booklist
Review
"[B]eautiful....[A] bigger, untidier, and ultimately more involving book [than Interpreter of Maladies]....[Lahiri is a] sophisticated, gimlet-eyed chronicler of contemporary urban American life. (Grade: A)" Entertainment Weekly
Review
"[P]oignant...a rich, stimulating fusion of authentic emotion, ironic observation, and revealing details. Readers who enjoyed the author's Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection...will not be disappointed." Library Journal
Review
"Jhumpa Lahiri expands her Pulitzer Prize-winning short stories of Indian assimilation into her lovely first novel, The Namesake." Vanity Fair
Review
"Though Lahiri writes with painstaking care, her dry synoptic style fails to capture the quirkiness of relationships....A disappointingly bland follow-up to a stellar story collection." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"This eagerly anticipated debut novel deftly expands on Lahiri's signature themes of love, solitude and cultural disorientation." Harper's Bazaar
Review
"Pulitzer Prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri weaves an intricate story of the cultural assimilation of an Indian family in America. Their bumpy journey to self-acceptance will move you." Maire Claire
Synopsis
This quietly beautiful family portrait "deftly expands on Lahiri's signature themes of love, solitude, and cultural disorientation" (Harper's Bazaar), the very themes that made her collection of stories an international bestseller.
About the Author
Jhumpa Lahiri was born 1967 in London, England, and raised in Rhode Island. She is a graduate of Barnard College, where she received a B.A. in English literature, and of Boston University, where she received an M.A. in English, M.A. in Creative Writing and M.A. in Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Her debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It was translated into twenty-nine languages and became a bestseller both in the United States and abroad. In addition to the Pulitzer, it received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison Metcalf Award, and a nomination for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Lahiri was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. The Namesake is Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel. She lives in New York with her husband and son.